It has been pointed out that Hannibal was coincidently born in the flux of the development of TVIV (St.James, 2015), a process of televisions moving away from TV sets and traditional regimes, then turning into the matrix media era.

One strong piece of evidence is that Hannibal had been cancellated by NBC because of the low rating and was available for Hulu and other regional platforms which offers SVOD service. These SVOD platforms play an important role in the process it goes viral globally attracting a mass of active fans.

Due to the traditional scheduled television, the simultaneous discussion happened that people gathered to talk about the content yesterday released. However, new models of individual viewing and self-scheduled cause a time difference in the water cooler moment among different viewers. (Balanzategui, 2018, p. 664) Meanwhile considering the tendency mediated, the space for the “water cooler” moment naturally relocates to social media platforms, where viewers analyse and deconstruct the text and share screenshots and GIFs, even accumulated in some particular community (Jenner, 2016, p. 269). As a quality crime television, Hannibal could transform the narratives from programmes to audiences through the nature decided by the crime genres releasing a number of threads and think pieces for audiences to “create”.(Reich, 2021) Here is an example of one of the analysations of the character relationships between Hannibal and Well on Tweets.

On the other hand, Curtin (2009) argued that the features of the matrix era are interactive exchanges and diverse modes of interpretation and use. TVIV which could be understood as a kind of matrix medium, provide successful strategies proved by Hannibal that emphasise multi-platforms and devices not only for the releasing but intensifying the relation between audience and text.

Another typical example is fan works including fanfiction, fanvids, and other sorts of things, which could all be considered as evolved behaviours engaging the text and could represent a tighter relation between audience and text. There are over 32700 works under the tag “Hannibal (TV)” on Archie of Our Own (the common website for recording fan works). Furthermore, Balanzategui (2018) regards this digital community as an “intense” and” excessive” audience-text relationship pointing out as Jenner describes. This kind of relationship may be based on TVIV which enables audiences could rewatch limitlessly or binge-watch.

Reference

Turner, G. and Tay, J. (2009) Television studies after TV understanding television in the post-broadcast era. London: Routledge.

Balanzategui, J. (2018) ‘The Quality Crime Drama in the TVIV Era: Hannibal, True Detective , and Surrealism’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 35(6), pp. 657–679. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2018.1499341.

Jenner, M. (2016) ‘Is this TVIV? On Netflix, TVIII and binge-watching’, New Media & Society, 18(2), pp. 257–273. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814541523.

Reich, J.E. (2021) How ‘True Detective’ fandom is changing the way we watch TV, The Daily Dot. Available at: https://www.dailydot.com/via/true-detective-fandom/ (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

St.James, E. (2015) What Hannibal’s cancellation — and possible renewal — tells us about the future of TV – Vox, What Hannibal’s cancellation — and possible renewal — tells us about the future of TV. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/1/8875749/hannibal-renewal-canceled-nbc-netflix (Accessed: 29 November 2022).

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